The son of a slave who dared to go bow to bow with Mozart: BRIAN VINER reviews ... trends now
Chevalier (12A, 108 mins)
Verdict: Jobbing biopic
Transformers: Rise of The Beasts (12A, 127 mins)
Verdict: Overlong and over-loud
The best five minutes of Chevalier come right at the start, when we are introduced to our hero, Joseph Bologne (the excellent Kelvin Harrison Jr), illegitimate son of an aristocratic Frenchman and a Senegalese slave, at a Mozart concert in 18th-century Paris.
It really is a Mozart concert, too. The star of the show is Wolfgang Amadeus himself, played by Joseph Prowen as a prissy diva. But when Mozart calls for requests, the unknown violinist Bologne strides dashingly and dishily down the aisle to suggest that he stands toe to toe with the great man.
If you recall the moment in 2009 when Susan Boyle first took the stage in Britain’s Got Talent, igniting ill-concealed derision in both audience and judges, that’s pretty much the scene here, only in frock coats and periwigs.
The best five minutes of Chevalier come right at the start, when we are introduced to our hero, Joseph Bologne (the excellent Kelvin Harrison Jr, pictured)
It’s mostly a true story, too, though I expect there was some dramatic licence with the duelling violins
The very idea that a fellow of mixed race might be able to hold his own next to Mozart! But then he starts to play and, of course, he’s sensational. It’s the violin equivalent of the so-called duelling banjos scene in Deliverance (1972).
The audience are spellbound, while Mozart is first astonished and then incensed. While Bologne takes the ovation, he storms into the wings to ask the 18th-century versions of Ant and Dec: who is that f***ing guy?
It’s a funny moment and, promisingly, appears to set us up for a comic telling of the undeniably remarkable story of a man later declared Chevalier de Saint-Georges — knighted, basically — by a smitten Queen, Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton).
It’s mostly a true story, too, though I expect there was some dramatic licence with the duelling violins.
Disappointingly, however, the rest of Stephen Williams’s film never lives up to that engaging opening scene, becoming a rather lump-enly formulaic account of Bologne’s rise and inevitable fall. We know his fall is inevitable because in a perfunctory flashback, Bologne’s nobleman father, after bringing the violin prodigy from Guadeloupe to install him in a swanky French music academy, tells him: ‘Do not give anyone any reason to tear you down.’ Warnings like that in screenplays like this mean only one thing.
At first, Bologne’s rise is vertiginous.After all, he is not just a virtuoso violinist; there are many other strings to his bow. He is handsome beyond words and a swordsman supreme (‘you play your instrument as well as you wield your sword,’ gushes the Queen, a line that prompted titters at Vue Leicester Square on Tuesday evening).
Anyway, she thinks he’s simply fab and so does the fragrant Marie-Josephine de Montalembert (Samara Weaving), into whose bed he soon falls.
This seems likely sooner or later (spoiler alert: it’s sooner) to arouse the wrath of her powerful husband, the Marquis de Montalembert, played one-dimensionally by Marton Csokas as a sneering rotter.
It appears to set us up for a comic telling of the undeniably remarkable story of a man later declared Chevalier de Saint-Georges — knighted, basically — by a smitten Queen, Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton, right)
She thinks he’s simply fab and so does the fragrant Marie-Josephine de Montalembert (Samara Weaving, pictured), into whose bed he soon falls
Nor is the Marquis remotely chuffed that Bologne has given Marie-Josephine, who sings like an angel, a starring role in his new opera. He has written it as part of a contest to determine whether he or the German composer Gluck (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) will become maestro of the Paris Opera, fully expecting to get the nod himself, but you might say that his Gluck is running out.
